IBM Claims World's Fastest Unix Server

By Michelle Savage

April 9, 2008 —  IBM unveiled what it called the “world’s fastest Unix server,” and a new water-cooled supercomputer, at a customer event in San Francisco yesterday.

Running at up to 5GHz, the new Unix enterprise server, the Power 595, is touted as the fastest Unix system out there. Most servers operate on 2-3GHz chips. The 64-core, 128-thread machine uses a new “point to point” interconnect technology to increase system bandwidth and maximize a system’s processors, cache memory and main memory. It has an aggregate memory bandwidth of 1.3 terabytes per second, according to IBM.

IBM expects the Power 595 to extend IBM’s leadership in the Unix market and capture Sun Solaris and HP Unix users. The company said its Power enterprise 64-core server delivers twice the performance at a comparable price as a similarly configured HP Superdome Itanium system.

The new water-cooled “Hydro-Cluster” is an update to IBM’s POWER5+ processor-based p575 supercomputer. IBM said using water-cooling in its servers will help customers deal with power shortages in their data centers.

Both systems are based on IBM’s POWER6 processor, which was launched last year and provides users nearly five times the performance and more than three times the energy efficiency of its predecessor.



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